Poetry at The Bridgewater Hall

Echoes of a Mountain Song – weekend finale

Saturday 23rd April – Sunday 24th April 2016

Our Echoes of a Mountain Song series culminates in a weekend of events exploring the creative freedom found in Northern landscapes. It also marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare on 23rd April, who is rumoured to have spent a period of ‘lost years’ serving wealthy Catholic families in Lancashire. That provides the ideal excuse to open the weekend with a celebration of northern poetry, written by two living Pennine poets and one of the first literary figures to hail from those hills, Emily Brontë. 

Josephine Dickinson

We begin our weekend of celebrations with the Northern Bards event, featuring Josephine Dickinson, Alison Prince and Bill Lloyd (Saturday 23rd April 11.00am). Award-winning poet and shepherd, Josephine Dickinson, has written movingly of her transformative experiences on a hill farm near Alston, a remote former Cumbrian mining town high in the Pennines. Overcoming profound deafness and drug-addiction, her attachment to landscape is both healing and revelatory. She reads from her latest work, Haggs and High Places, offering a unique perspective on the peatlands of Upper Teesdale. She read Classics at Oxford University and has published four collections of poetry: Scarberry Hill (The Rialto, 2001), The Voice (Flambard 2003), Silence Fell (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and Night Journey (Flambard 2008). She was first choice of both judges in in Staple magazine’s competition seeking the best 'alternative generation' contemporary British poets and has been much anthologized. Josephine Dickinson’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Independent on Sunday and Poetry Review. She is widely sought after as reader, tutor, reviewer, workshop leader and mentor in both the US and the UK.

She is joined by children’s author and poet, Alison Prince who lives on the Isle of Arran and has written the libretto for the series’ community opera, Get Weaving. Alison created the classic children’s TV series Trumpton in the 1960s and has been a successful children’s author and poet ever since, publishing an anthology Having Been in the City in 1998 and winning The Literary Review’s prestigious Grand Poetry Prize in both 1998 and 2006.

Extracts from Simon Armitage’s Walking Home, his account of hiking along The Pennine Way, will be read by actor and folk singer Bill Lloyd, along with a section of Basil Bunting’s Briggflats, his poetic masterpiece about the landscape around Sedbergh. 

Tickets for the Northern Bards event cost £8.00 and include tea and coffee in our Barbirolli Room. 

Following the Northern Bards event, there will be a Pop-up poetry reading in our Stalls Foyer. A selection of poems that have been written and submitted to us by the public will be read aloud between 1.00pm and 2.00pm. This event is free.

Next up is Unquiet Earth: Words & music about the life & work of Emily Brontë. Despite her short life, Emily Brontë produced one of the most original novels of the 19th century, Wuthering Heights. In a sequence of words and music, we discover more about this enigmatic freespirit who loved the Yorkshire moors.

Andrew Keeling

Todmorden-based composer Robin Walker has set four of her poems, exploring lost love and resignation, to music. Extracts from the novel and other writings appear alongside a stormy piano sonata by Beethoven, whose cantata about unobtainable love, Adelaide, was among the Brontës’ music collection in Haworth. 

Finally, Lancashire-based Andrew Keeling’s piano trio Unquiet Earth responds to Wuthering Heights’ ambivalent last paragraphs in music of rare pathos.  The event takes place in the Barbirolli Room and tickets are £8.00.

Full details about the Echoes of a Mountain Song series can be found on our website.